Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, broadcasts, and so on. Such networks, which are usually multiple access networks, support communications for multiple users by sharing the available network resources. One example of such a network is the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN). The UTRAN is the radio access network (RAN) defined as a part of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a third generation (3G) mobile phone technology supported by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The UMTS, which is the successor to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) technologies, currently supports various air interface standards, such as Wideband-Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA), Time Division—Code Division Multiple Access (TD-CDMA), and Time Division—Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA). The UMTS also supports enhanced 3G data communications protocols, such as High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), which provides higher data transfer speeds and capacity to associated UMTS networks.
Another form of communications used in a 3GPP based access network is Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) based messaging. USSD was originally developed for GSM. USSD based messaging allows a Mobile Station (MS) user and a network entity (e.g., a public land mobile network (PLMN)) application to communicate in a way which is transparent to the MS and to intermediate network entities. For example, Machine to Machine (M2M) triggering in cdma2000 can be done by use of USSD. The USSD in CDMA2000 is currently supported via use of a traffic channel only, and cannot be communicated using a common (e.g., paging) channel. Similar to Short Message Services (SMS), the USSD uses a type of Data Burst Message (DBM). Switching between traffic channel and the common channel is based on the size of the payload for SMS. Such a process is not currently possible for USSD. As such, even when a small message (e.g., M2M triggering) is being sent using USSD, a traffic channel connection must be used.